


Last Stop

by Star_trekkin_across_theuniverse



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 20:46:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3623727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_trekkin_across_theuniverse/pseuds/Star_trekkin_across_theuniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm with you to the end of the line." The words haunted him. Who was the man with the shield, and who was Bucky?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Stop

“ _Coz I’m with you to the end of the line._ ” The words hit him like a freight train, jarring him to his core. He knew them, just like he knew this man. He hesitated, just a fraction of a second. It was long enough, in the chaos of the helicarrier destruction. A girder fell, dropping them over the Potomac. He watched as this man, this hero who claimed to be his friend fell to what certainly would be his death. He watched as he fell himself, and he knew, just as certainly as he knew the man, that he would drag him to safety once they were both in the water.

Once they were on the riverbank, he felt doubt wash over him again. This man, this friend, he wasn’t sure he remembered him. He reminded him of someone he’d known. Sickly. Small. The words rang in his head, “ _I’m with you to the end of the line._ ”

Without a backward glance, he left the man at the river’s edge and walked away.

XXX

The Smithsonian exhibit was overwhelming, and he felt his breath hitch as he read about Bucky Barnes, who was the only Howling Commando to give his life. And there was the hero, the man who called him friend. And with him, other familiar faces. He read the displays and felt the tug of recollection, like he should know more than just that Dum Dum Dugan’s first name was Timothy. He thought he remembered the impact of a fist in his stomach, and the laughter of friends as Dugan was taunted, but it was just at the periphery of his mind, like a dust mote floating beyond his line of vision. He scanned the info about Jim Morita, and could hear his voice grumbling a comparison between POW camps and internment camps. He turned away from the display and came face to face with a graphic of a scrawny, sickly looking blond, and he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself.

Steve. This was the friend he swore to stay with. Long afternoons in movie theatres because Steve was too sick to head to the beach. Unsuccessful double dates because Steve was too shy to dance. His stomach twisted.

“Son, are you okay?” An elderly security guard placed a hand on him, and he discovered he was shaking.

“Yeah, I –“

“There should be a warning. Never eat the hot dogs from the street vendor outside,” the old guy chuckled. “Try not to puke on the uniforms. I’ve been in hot water since Cap’s went missing.”

XXX

The air outside was hot, suffocating him in his heavy denim jacket. He sat down on a cement bench facing the building and closed his eyes, pulling, begging his memory to give him something. Flashes of old cars, an itchy uniform, a beautiful woman who never saw him in the shadow of someone brighter. And then pain. The recollection so raw and visceral that he felt the pain, all the way down his left arm. He flexed his hand, his face a mask of confusion. Although the doctors had warned him of it, he had never experienced phantom pains in his arm. Not in seventy years. The pain was so debilitating he wanted to scream. He ground his fist into the cement, smashing it beneath his hand to remind himself there was no sensation there, and pushed himself to his feet, determined to carry on.

XXX

The public library was quiet, the few patrons scattered amongst the stacks. He stepped up to a computer terminal and entered a few search terms. The screen filled, declassified data from the fall of SHIELD coming up with every query. He scanned the file about Captain Rogers quickly. A photo in that file led him to the woman’s file, and his eyes widened momentarily. He got a flash of a little girl in a leotard running down a hallway when he saw her real name, and he shook his head and looked away. He clicked back into Rogers’ file and then searched his own. The same information as the Smithsonian had. Then he searched again, and the file kept on the Winter Soldier opened. Dozens of kills, the details of which were completely unfamiliar. The soldier was a killing machine, with no remorse, no regret. Was that really him? Hadn’t he saved Rogers?

He reread the grizzly account of the assassination of a scientist, and flinched, reliving the moment. His gut twisted again, and he knew he was both Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier. He knew and the weight of his actions nearly crushed him.

“No.” His voice was hardly a whisper, and before anyone in the library could notice he’d even been there, he was gone again.

XXX

He was sure every Hydra safe house had been compromised. He knew it deep in his bones, but he also had nowhere else to go. After DC, and the fall of SHIELD, and the helicarriers, and Steve and Bucky, he was in the wind. But it was different. In the past, he’d been kept safe, hidden away from the world. Now he was in the world, and trying to remember how to function. And even those few recollections he had were all seventy years old.

Brooklyn had changed. A lot. He walked, lost, through the streets hoping that something would look familiar. And finally a bolt from the past in the form of a rundown theatre. The same theatre where he’d seen Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane, of the few titles he could recall.

From the theatre he didn’t even need to look up to mark the steps to his building, instinct took over. But when he stopped and looked up, his building was gone. At least, it seemed gone. He tilted his head back and looked up, taking in the entire façade. Same height. Same number of stairs leading to the front door. An exterior refurbishment. He shook his head and climbed the stairs. It wasn’t hard to jar the door open, and if his spotty memory served, there was a cubby behind the boiler room that no one knew about. It probably still held Steve and Bucky’s childhood secrets.

He slumped down the stairs and put his shoulder to the boiler room door and pushed his way in. Probably around the same time that the exterior of the building had been modernized, the boiler had been retrofitted. He grimaced and made his way to the back wall of the room. He was sure there had been a door, seventy years ago. The depression in the floor in front of the wall proved he was right about the boiler obscuring it in the past. He rested his head against the wall, feeling more lost than he had since he’d seen his face in the Smithsonian. As he stared at his feet he noticed the joint where the wall met the floor was bare of the accumulated dirt that always seemed to ring rooms like this one. Almost as though there was air flowing through a crack. He felt along the edge of the wall until his fingers found play, and he was astonished when the entire wall swung wide, revealing the door that had been trapped in his memory. He rattled the knob and it popped open.

He stepped into the room and reached out, looking for the string for the light. It was a foolish thought, thinking the same bulb would still be there, but as though he had wished it into being, the cord tangled in his right hand, and light flooded the small space. He turned to make sure he could close the secret passage and still get out, and was relieved to see a lever on the false wall.

Once he was secure in the hidey-hole, he took a moment to look around. He didn’t trust his memory, but he wanted to think everything was as they’d left if before he’d deployed. He reached to the shelf above the door, and pulled down a pair of notebooks. Bucky’s name was on one; Steve’s was on the other. Art class. When Steve had seen his first naked dame. He chuckled at the memory, and flipped through Steve’s notebook. Steve had always been the better artist. Bucky’d tagged along for the chance to see a naked dame without having to take her to the pictures first.

Next he found a tin can with a princely 75 cents in it, and a couple of smokes. A tin of sardines that he didn’t think he would trust, Steve’s ration book. A moth eaten blanket. A dog-earred copy of Grapes of Wrath. There was nothing that would help him, but he recalled that theft had come easy to him when he’d been desperate. After Steve’s mom had passed, there’d been some desperation. He grabbed for the dusty brick of the wall and caught his breath as a flood of memory cascaded across him. Steve’s mother dying of tuberculosis, Steve coming home alone.

“ _I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._ ”

His breathing got shallow and he saw spots. He hadn’t felt lightheaded like this since the first time Hydra had treated him. Around the dots in his vision, the flashes of memories rushed, a jumble of images in no particular order. His arm, a painful surgery, peanuts at the Stark Expo, an exploding pyre of burning weapons in a secret facility. That beautiful woman again, laughing at something Steve said. He brought his hands to his head and closed his eyes, futilely hoping to stem the tide of recollection.

Underlying the cacophony of his mind, he was dimly aware of the grinding of rusted metal and the careful steps of a predator.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I thought you were dead.” Steve’s voice was exactly as he remembered it. Seventy years and it hadn’t changed.

“We’ve established that I’m not. Maybe I should be.”

“Not today.”

“How did you find me?” He looked up at Steve, his eyes narrowed.

“Luck?” Steve shrugged. “If I had nowhere to go. If I had one memory come back to me. The only warm place in the building in the winter, and you’d bring me down here when I couldn’t catch my breath for coughing.”

“Now what?” He wondered about the man with the wings. Was he waiting outside the door, ready to put him down? He found himself asking.

“Sam’s not a killer.” Steve shook his head.

“I am.”

“Buck – “

“Don’t call me that.” He wasn’t ready to have a name.

“Let me help you.”


End file.
